Saturday, November 28, 2009
21st Century Breakdown
Here's hoping anyone who may read this had a great Thanksgiving. Mine was pretty good. Turkey for me and turkey for you as Adam Sandler once put it.
After being one of the 100,000.00 Americans unemployed for most of the past year, I finally landed a new job. The problem is, it's only temporary for the holidays with the possibility of becoming permanent.
So I might go and make some money for a while and then have to go back and pound the pavement again.
The last year in a way has been the 21st Century Breakdown that Green Day referred to on their latest album. People call the 80s the Decade of Greed. But the 80s don't have anything on the 00s (or whatever the armchair social studies teachers call them nowadays), which saw more mass consumer spending, more out of control spending by the government, more mergers, more mass corporate acquisitions and an ever widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Many people who once aspired to do "great things" instead spent most of the past decade being "consumers". Recall the scene in The Graduate where Mr. Mcguire informs Ben Braddock that there's a future in "plastics". Gen X went from being the grunge generation to being the dot com generation to ultimately being the plastics generation. Which is what happens to most generations, Braddock's included.
People now wonder why didn't the sixties generation live up to its full potential. In a few decades, I suspect some armchair sociologists (a group of which I admittedly am a member) will look back and wonder why the same thing happened to Gen X. I think there are 2 reasons for this. One, the simple fact is that there is a fine line between talking about a revolution and actually having one. It's fun to talk about a revolution much as it was fun back in high school to fantasize about overthrowing the administration of Piper High. But did we actually do it? No. The reason why we didn't is because we realized that toppling a hierarchy will likely leave a vacuum that you better have the wherewithal to fill. If you don't, the result will most likely be organized chaos or flat out anarchy.
The other one is that Gen X never had a central counterculture, never had a firm set of oppositional values. There were many spin-off crowds based on tastes in things like music (Alt rock, hip-hop) and movies (Star Wars, Harry Potter), subcultures (Goths, tech geeks) and so on. But while members of those groups would intersect with members of the other groups, they often would quickly retreat back to their respective little harem. Eventually, most of them either retreated totally to their own personal space (as I did) or they got ground up in the machine. A lot of the tech geeks set out to join the dot com boom and when that fizzled, ended up in management positions in places like TAG. A few did go on to become "artists". But those were few and far between. The sad truth is that many Gen Xers had very few original thoughts in their head. That's why so many of them ended up in plastics.
So here I am, grateful to finally be employed again. But worried that the job may not last and I may end up pounding the pavement again in a month or so while confronted with a higher insurance bill. At the same time, I'm also trying to avoid getting ground up in the corporate machine and winding up an unhappy corporate drone doped by sex, religion and daytime TV (to paraphrase the late John Lennon).
Here's hoping anyone who may read this had a great Thanksgiving. Mine was pretty good. Turkey for me and turkey for you as Adam Sandler once put it.
After being one of the 100,000.00 Americans unemployed for most of the past year, I finally landed a new job. The problem is, it's only temporary for the holidays with the possibility of becoming permanent.
So I might go and make some money for a while and then have to go back and pound the pavement again.
The last year in a way has been the 21st Century Breakdown that Green Day referred to on their latest album. People call the 80s the Decade of Greed. But the 80s don't have anything on the 00s (or whatever the armchair social studies teachers call them nowadays), which saw more mass consumer spending, more out of control spending by the government, more mergers, more mass corporate acquisitions and an ever widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Many people who once aspired to do "great things" instead spent most of the past decade being "consumers". Recall the scene in The Graduate where Mr. Mcguire informs Ben Braddock that there's a future in "plastics". Gen X went from being the grunge generation to being the dot com generation to ultimately being the plastics generation. Which is what happens to most generations, Braddock's included.
People now wonder why didn't the sixties generation live up to its full potential. In a few decades, I suspect some armchair sociologists (a group of which I admittedly am a member) will look back and wonder why the same thing happened to Gen X. I think there are 2 reasons for this. One, the simple fact is that there is a fine line between talking about a revolution and actually having one. It's fun to talk about a revolution much as it was fun back in high school to fantasize about overthrowing the administration of Piper High. But did we actually do it? No. The reason why we didn't is because we realized that toppling a hierarchy will likely leave a vacuum that you better have the wherewithal to fill. If you don't, the result will most likely be organized chaos or flat out anarchy.
The other one is that Gen X never had a central counterculture, never had a firm set of oppositional values. There were many spin-off crowds based on tastes in things like music (Alt rock, hip-hop) and movies (Star Wars, Harry Potter), subcultures (Goths, tech geeks) and so on. But while members of those groups would intersect with members of the other groups, they often would quickly retreat back to their respective little harem. Eventually, most of them either retreated totally to their own personal space (as I did) or they got ground up in the machine. A lot of the tech geeks set out to join the dot com boom and when that fizzled, ended up in management positions in places like TAG. A few did go on to become "artists". But those were few and far between. The sad truth is that many Gen Xers had very few original thoughts in their head. That's why so many of them ended up in plastics.
So here I am, grateful to finally be employed again. But worried that the job may not last and I may end up pounding the pavement again in a month or so while confronted with a higher insurance bill. At the same time, I'm also trying to avoid getting ground up in the corporate machine and winding up an unhappy corporate drone doped by sex, religion and daytime TV (to paraphrase the late John Lennon).
